Last week, the Archbishop of York criticised the National Trust and Cadbury for dropping the word ‘Easter’ from the name of their annual egg hunt. This prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to take time out of her visit to the Middle East to state: ‘I think the stance they have taken is absolutely ridiculous.’

Here are seven reasons why the whole story was was ridiculous.

1. The National Trust and Cadbury didn’t actually drop Easter

In fact the National Trust claimed there were over 13,000 references to Easter on its website. When we went through the website at the time, every page we looked at prominently mentioned Easter in its headline and in most graphics. The same is true for Cadbury’s own site. For example:

2. Almost no-one wants to drop Easter anyway

There have been no calls by any campaign groups to remove Easter from marketing materials. We respect the right of National Trust and Cadbury to name their egg hunt what they like, but this is not something anyone has been campaigning for so the notion that this has come about (were it even true) as part of some secular erosion of Christianity in Britain is, again, ridiculous.

3. Quakers don’t celebrate Easter

The Archbishop of York claimed that dropping the word ‘Easter’ was ‘tantamount to spitting on the grave’ of Cadbury’s Quaker founder John Cadbury. However, as one of his great-great-great-great-granddaughters pointed out, John Cadbury ‘believed that every day is equally sacred and, back then, this was expressed by not marking festivals.’

I'm sure John Cadbury (my g. g. g. g. grandfather) is not spinning in his grave. As a Quaker, he didn't celebrate Easter @JohnSentamu

4. Both the word ‘Easter’ and the symbol of eggs are derived from non-Christian traditions

Neither are even Christian anyway. The word ‘Easter’ comes from the Germanic goddess Eostre. Eggs have been used as symbols of fertility and renewal in many cultures from Ancient Egypt to Zoroastrianism, including in the pre-Christian celebrations that became the Easter we know today. So ironically the Archbishop of York is using the supposed separation of two aspects of Easter that Christianity has appropriated to claim that Christianity is being marginalised.

5. This is not the first time the Church of England has essentially fabricated a story

In 2015 the Church of England wrongly claimed that a company controlling cinema advertising had ‘banned’ its advert featuring of the Lord’s prayer because there was a risk of the prayer being ‘offensive’. In fact, the company has a blanket policy of not allowing any religious or non-religious advertising, which is very common, due to fears that some advertising in that range could offend some people, and the specific advert had in no way been labelled offensive. This is another attempt to misleadingly claim that Christianity is being ‘marginalised’. The Church of England was in fact told of the decision before it had even finished making the advert in question, then made the advert anyway, and only then publicised the decision, in order to get blanket coverage for its campaign (which was about getting more people to pray). Sound familiar?

6. This annual debacle around ‘Easter’ and ‘eggs’ coincides with the rise of an evangelical egg company

In his criticism of the National Trust and Cadbury the Archbishop of York suggested that consumers should purchase eggs from a proselytising chocolate company with strong ties to the Church of England instead. Since that company came onto the scene in 2012, there have every year been stories about Cadbury and others downplaying the significance of Easter on their chocolate eggs. Funny, that…

7. There are more important things in the world

Theresa May made these comments whilst on an official state visit to Saudi Arabia, distracting from more important issues such as the post-Brexit trade relationship, the arms trade, or the persecution of Christians, who are forbidden from practising their faith openly in the gulf state. And the same day the egg story broke there was also news around a new case on assisted dying. Shouldn’t we be focusing on these more important issues instead?

The debacle over what to call an Easter egg hunt is really a storm in an eggcup created in a bid by the Church of England to maintain its relevance in an increasingly non-religious country. We should not be duped by this ulterior motive into giving such blanket coverage to the Church, or else we will see these non-stories continue to dominate the news cycle and distract from more important affairs.

Hermann Vogel’s Death of Spartacus, showing the Thracian gladiator’s capture, shortly before his crucifixion

Historical, mythical or legendary, the crucifixion of Christ represents the story of many. Whether or not the man called Jesus existed – and the modern scholarly view on this seems to range from ‘probably’ to ‘possibly’ – the gospel narrative reflects a wider human story, the story of thousands upon thousands of nameless and forgotten individuals who were crucified at the hands of the Roman state.

For anyone who assumes that crucifixion was an unusual or extraordinary event in Roman times, they should consider the case of the rebels led by Spartacus. This low-born Thracian gladiator-slave led a revolt so successful that it caused considerable embarrassment to the ruling Senate. When Crassus finally crushed the rebellion in 71 BCE, he ordered the crucifixion of an estimated 6,000 slave-rebels along the Appian Way, the main road leading out from the city of Rome; he also brought back the ruthless practice of decimation to punish and terrorise the cohort of soldiers that he deemed to have failed him the most in his earlier attempts to quash the rebellion.

Crucifixion was public and humiliating – deliberately so – and its use in the case of the slave-rebels illustrates several important points about this notorious and brutal method of execution. Its aim was to demean the victim and intimidate the observer – this was what happened to you when you challenged the Roman rule of law. Crucifixion was a servile supplicium – reserved for slaves and foreigners, non-Roman citizens, deserting soldiers, pirates and insurgents; wealthy Roman men were often removed from society due to political machinations or the whim of current authority, but never was crucifixion used to dispense with them.

In its broadest definition, crucifixion meant that the victim was impaled and/or tied to some form of frame, cross, stake or tree and left to hang for anything from several hours to several days. Causes of death included exhaustion and shock brought on by extreme pain and exsanguination (sometimes in part from a scourging prior to the crucifixion), heart failure and/or pulmonary collapse from the immense pressure put upon the victim’s heart and lungs; the victim’s demise could be hastened dramatically by increasing the intensity of this pressure, hence the common practice of breaking the legs to precipitate collapse. It was a sadistic and grotesque formula for murder, exploited in extremis by the Romans.

It is not clear whether the emperor Constantine outlawed crucifixion in the 4th Century CE, as is claimed by Christian triumphalist writers, but certainly it had been outlawed in the Roman empire by the mid 5th century. However, the Classical world is not the only context in which this abhorrent method of slaughter has been practised. Japanese haritsuke started with the execution of 26 Christians in Nagasaki in 1597 and recurred intermittently up until the last century. Islam has also subsumed the practice, with verse 5:33 of the Qur’an calling for the crucifixion of those who wage war against Allah or the Prophet. Crucifixion is still practised in some Islamic countries and there have been recently documented cases in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen; it is most commonly used to make a degrading and threatening showpiece of the victim’s body rather than as a method of execution, but this is not exclusively the case.

‘The Easter story means nothing to a humanist from a spiritual perspective… Yet each year the human side of the Easter story can serve as a sober reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.’

The Easter story means nothing to a humanist from a spiritual perspective; we do not believe that Christ was the son of God, nor do we believe that he died for our sins and was resurrected. Yet each year the human side of the Easter story can serve as a sober reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. In a modern context, we can and should take action by giving support to the work of organisations such as Amnesty International, who campaign tirelessly and effectively against the use of torture and capital punishment right across the globe.

But as a Classicist, I cannot help but see the story of Christ as a legend within its ancient milieu and recall the incalculable number of wasted human lives that resonate through its narrative. In the name of Roman civilisation, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were tortured and crucified, forgotten souls with no afforded legacy of reverence or pious gratitude to preserve them in the conscious minds of the living.